1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus that employs either a paper document, or image data for a document, to generate electronic document data that can be edited, and an image processing method and a program therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, it has become common practice for documents to be prepared not merely by inputting characters, but also by incorporating the products of high level functions, such as script provided using font effects or drawings prepared by graphics programs, or by including photographs.
However, when a document is to be created that includes more complex contents, a great deal more labor is required to prepare the document in its entirety, from the beginning. Therefore, it is desirable that part of a previously prepared document be employed unchanged, or that, in the event, a formerly processed and edited document be utilized.
Further, opportunities for the electronic distribution of documents have been increased by the spread of networks, as represented by the Internet, while, furthermore, the distribution of electronic documents that have been reproduced on paper is also frequently employed.
There is a technique proposed according to which, even when only a paper document is on hand as a distributed document, the paper document can be employed to obtain the contents of the document as reusable data. For example, in the description provided for Japanese Patent No. 4251629, a paper document is electronically scanned by an apparatus and a database search is performed to obtain a document whose contents match those of the scanned document, so that the data provided by the thus obtained document can be used for the scanned document. But even in a case wherein a document having the same contents cannot be found in the database, the data obtained by scanning the paper document can be converted into reusable data, and the contents of the scanned document can be reused.
For this data conversion, there is a conventional technique, called the OCR technique, for converting character information included in image data obtained by scanning a paper document (hereinafter referred to as document data) into easily reusable electronic data. According to Japanese Patent No. 4251629 described above, a sentence structure component, such as the order in which characters are read, is analyzed in order to easily process the character information obtained by the OCR. Based on the thus obtained information for the order in which characters are read, the character information is loaded into an electronic file, such as an XML file, to generate an electronic document. As a result, there is an improvement in usability.
However, in a case wherein the structure employed for a paper document is to be reproduced and output is to be provided by employing a column layout to generate an electronic document, the document layout that appears on the paper document may not be reproduced, depending on an output specification for an electronic document format that is employed. For example, when a format allowing text to flow from page to page, in order, i.e., a word processing document format is employed, a structure wherein a column layout includes another type of column layout cannot be reproduced, and further, a layout such as one for a newspaper, where the sentence order does not match the coordinate sequence, can also not be reproduced. It should be noted that a column layout is an arrangement of characters and graphics constructed by breaking up text among two or more columns.